Are the streets of your downtown all too similar to each other, all full of lots of cars and maybe a few trucks and buses? Do the differences between parallel streets, in commercial character and pedestrian life, seem feeble compared to the mass of identical traffic lanes that dominate the visual impression? Often, the most efficient downtown network designs, and the best urban design outcomes, result from making parallel streets more different from each other, more specialized around different functions. Streetcars (trams) used to drive such specialization, and sometimes still do, but elsewhere cities need to find their way back to that logic, with or without streetcars. One of the first big American successes in this direction was the Portland transit mall, which opened in 1977. There, two of the most central streets in downtown were given over primarily to transit, while parallel streets one block over were devoted mainly to cars. Continue Reading →
Portland
Portland: Counting by 17
As hard budget shortfalls sweep across North America, transit agencies are making all kinds of changes to balance the budget. Portland’s Tri-Met tried at first to cut low-ridership services, but as the red ink keeps flowing they’ve finally had to cut something every urbanist should care about. They’re cutting the core Frequent Network, the service that’s designed to meet the needs of people who want to get around the city easily all day, with spontaneity and a sense of personal freedom. Continue Reading →
Can Rapid Transit Work Along Freeways?
Lately there’s been a groundswell of talk among transit advocates about the need to stop building rapid transit along freeways. To honor the imminent opening of Portland’s Green Line, which runs mostly along the east side of that city’s I-205 freeway, I thought I’d weigh in on this a little, with some relevant pictures fresh from Berlin.
Legibility as Marketing: The “To-Via” Question
From Portland’s newly rebuilt transit mall, here’s a great example of the idea that clear information is the best marketing.
Every transit line goes TO some endpoint VIA some street or intermediate destination. But which matters more, the TO or the VIA? Which should be emphasized in the naming of a route and the signage on buses and stops? Both, if you can do it succinctly. But if you have to choose, think about where on the route you are and what information is most likely to be useful there. Continue Reading →
Symbolic Logic for Transit Advocates: A Short but Essential Course
Part of our job as informed citizens and voters is to sift through the political claims that we hear and arrive at our own sense of what’s true. I’ve been listening to such claims in the transit business, and sometimes making them, for almost 30 years now. It occurs to me that one of the most important tools for evaluating these claims is something you probably learned in high school math and forgot. (Yes, some of you remembered, but I’m really talking to the ones who forgot. To those of you who just don’t like math, don’t worry if you don’t follow this next bit; just skim ahead to the example. This IS really important.)
Here it is.
Consider a statement of the form “If A is true, then B is true,” [A –> B]
IF that statement is true, then:
- The Converse, [B –> A] is not necessarily true.
- The Inverse [NOT A –> NOT B] is not necessarily true.
- The Contrapositive [NOT B –> NOT A] IS true.
Today’s “Car Street,” Tomorrow’s Rapid Transit
Last week Portland’s Metro released a High Capacity Transit study, which identifies the region’s next priorities for rapid transit. Rapid transit, as explained here, encompasses high-frequency services that serve widely spaced stations rather than local stops. It’s typically implemented by “metro” heavy rail, light rail, or Bus Rapid Transit, though the first of those is unlikely at Portland’s scale. The official US term is “high capacity transit (HCT),” a term I like less because it’s more removed from the customer’s point of view.
Since we all look at the pictures before we read the words, here’s a picture of the long term Portland vision (click, as always, to enlarge):
I want to notice a couple of really smart things about this plan, plus a curious one:
Streetcars: An Inconvenient Truth
It’s a big day for streetcars. Portland has released its draft Streetcar System Concept Plan, an ambitious vision for extending the city’s popular downtown streetcar all over the city. There are similar plans underway in Seattle, Minneapolis, and many other cities.
I love riding streetcars, and I don’t want to shock anyone, so let’s start with a warning: This article contains an observation about streetcars that is not entirely effusive. It may provoke hostile reactions from some streetcar enthusiasts. It would probably be better for my transit planning career if I didn’t make this observation, but unfortunately it seems to be true, and very important, and not widely acknowledged or understood. So I’m going to say it.